CHNM links to the City University of New York site “The Lost Museum” about P.T. Barnum’s house of entertainment. The site offers a broad survey of social history in the 19th century city, involving such areas as race relations, gender relations, working conditions, style/fashion and particularly interesting, documentation through the museum’s exhibits of American middle class attitudes toward the wider world that was beginning to become known at the popular level through the European colonial experience.
The web site is formatted in the “mystery” genre that Kurt covered in his posting on several such sites. The “hook” is provided in the account of the fire that destroyed Barnum’s house of wonders. The intro is an opening Flash movie that cleverly uses PT Barnum’s portrait snip-out parts–a bit like animating a paper doll–to have him read a dire warning that his museum is about to be burned down. The device is very effective, but exploring the site can be done without following the mystery. I find such mysteries annoying, but that’s just me.
There is a museum tour of each floor (not very extensive, with only a few objects in each room explained, and a room or so on each floor, so that was a bit disappointing.) The artwork does nicely convey what such an early museum was like when that communication form was just developing as an urban institutional expression. The site consists of archives of visual and documentary evidence from the time, a reconstruction of the museum, essays by one or more historians, and a marvelous map of lower Manhattan in 3-D, with a highlight ID interface with pop-up views of the buildings, a magnification lens, which is very easy to use. On some of the images, it would be nice to be able to zoom in, because the size of the images makes it difficult to study them, or even to see the point.
In summary, the site offers a remarkable slice of life from the time, and dispels the naysayers’ views of teaching US history as if it were an exercise in names, dates and patriotic stories, while pooh-poohing the “trivial” things that supposedly are emphasized at the expense of the national epic. A technique that might be called clustering in teaching history takes an object rich in detail and significance, and makes of it a window on the history of the period. An even more apt metaphor might be a prism, or a gem, because the particular phenomenon under study reveals so many facets of life at the time. To compile a partial list: the museum as part of NYC; the figure of P.T. Barnum as a public figure and a wealthy man of the world, as he styled himself; the urban architecture of the place (looks a bit like a department store); objects in the museum as artifacts of the American scene and the role of the US as an extension of European reach to continents and cultures under exploration; the lectures that conveyed American attitudes more than knowledge, and like media today, stood in an ambiguous relationship to normative processes; the possibilities and limitations of technology during that time, and many others.
The web site provides a compact format for layered, catalogued display of the many levels of content that are made available, and by grouping the content around the mystery, it provides incentives to the viewer to explore the whole. At the same time, exploring the site is not dependent on using the mystery, so the interface is not too rigid either. I did not find that getting into the mystery was easy, and never fully understood how to do it. The need to register with a user name and password seems to me both superfluous and extraordinarily annoying. What could possibly require this process, except the possibility that one was not finished viewing. I guess teachers could assign the site and record the student’s notes and clues? The reality of the classroom is this: either the lab would be booked for one class session and that would have to suffice, or students would be expected to explore the site on their own at home or in a library. There just isn’t that much time available. Managing a large class with a complex interface seems just a bit overdone. Students on their own could gain a lot, however, and assigning groups to explore various aspects and report on them could work.